Travel back with me, friends, to New York in the early '90s. The internet was used for emailing and alt.something newsgroups. (OK, maybe not for you, Al Gore, you were blogging or creating Amazon. Me, I was posting to the Pavement fan list and emailing. That's all.)
Record and comic book and zine stores: a handful. In other words, to stay up on non-mainstream media, you could take a walk around lower Manhattan for a few hours, have a couple conversations, flip through your preferred publications and feel pretty secure in your awareness of what was happening via CD, seven inch, etc.
These days? Even alt-biggies like Mike Mills are producing shit I don't know about any more over here. No one tells me anything! I browse around and it dawns on me that there's a whole world of books I don't know about. Not in the "Books are being written by Hungarian authors in basements" sense, but in the "There's an entire world of Japanese craft books that I was OK without but now I am convinced I must have to live a complete life." (Ask my mom--I am convinced that my entrance to heaven lies in making animals out of pom-poms. What?) My completist tendencies, the ones that were kept in check with vague ignorance, are wholly out of control when the internet is involved.
(Also, shouldn't Kim Gordon like, I don't know, send me a letter when she puts books out? I'm just saying.)
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(Also, shouldn't Kim Gordon like, I don't know, send me a letter when she puts books out? I'm just saying.)